To support and accelerate the digitalisation of the manufacturing industry, Innovate UK KTN is working with UKRI to drive innovation to support the adoption of digital technology through Made Smarter Innovation. Made Smarter Innovation is one of UKRI’s Industrial Strategy challenge programmes, investing £147m into creating a fully connected, dynamic manufacturing ecosystem inspiring innovation across academia, technology providers and manufacturers.
The Made Smarter Innovation Network webinars will showcase the journeys of manufacturers who have been innovative in their adoption of digital technologies to improve performance, alongside digital technology providers creating innovative solutions to aid the manufacturers journey. The 8-week webinar series will showcase a manufacturer who has worked together with a technology provider, as well as a technology start-up and supporter, who manufacturers can utilise to help solve manufacturing problems.
The webinars, which are all running on Tuesdays from 12:00-13:00 and which will all be recorded, will be of interest to manufacturers who want to reach a manufacturing audience and are aspiring to be more productive, efficient, competitive, and resilient using digital technologies, integrators, innovators, and digital technology solution.
Upcoming webinars
22nd February 2022, 12:00 – 13:00
Innovative Digital Technologies in Continuous Improvement
Capturing data to support decision making is crucial to modern continuous improvement programmes, but as the volume of data grows exponentially, powerful analytical and visualisation techniques are needed to bring the data to life. This area of innovation is progressing at a fast pace, and we will highlight the significant benefits of dedicated solutions in this technology area. The benefits of incremental gains compound over time, so the sooner you start the greater the performance gains over slower rivals.
1st March 2022, 12:00 – 13:00
Innovative Digital Technologies in New Product Development
Product development might be driven by changing customer demands or may be unlocked by new production capability to satisfy existing customer demand. This event will explore the digital technologies and associated systems across supply chains – specifically, technologies that can drive and enable opportunities for new products or variants.
8th March 2022, 12:00 – 13:00
Innovative Digital Technologies in Quality Management
Ensuring your finished product meets the requirements of your customers is the difference between selling your product (and not). This event will explore how the application of digital technology may improve production quality directly or reduce the time involved in ensuring quality through management and data sharing activity.
15th March 2022, 12:00 – 13:00
Innovative Digital Technologies in Flexible Manufacturing
Production efficiency often centres around a consistent product and process, optimised to run with minimal downtime. But what happens when customers demand more product variation, where you need to switch a process from one product to another, or where batch sizes are small? This event will explore how digital technology can help manufacturers maintain efficiency and asset utilisation whilst offering the customer what they want.
22nd March 2022, 12:00 – 13:00
Innovative Digital Technologies in Production Systems
Integrated digital production management systems within a business can deliver control and optimisation of manufacturing, product lifecycle and resource management processes. The main systems are SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), which controls the machines and equipment, and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) which controls the activities on the factory floor both within and between each operation.
You can view all past webinars here on the KTN website.
Innovative Digital Technologies in Predictive Maintenance
This event explored the emergence of products and services that inform manufacturers as to when their shop floor equipment is likely to require maintenance. These are based on the measurement of various parameters that show a predictable connection with component life, combined with AI/machine learning.
We heard from both providers of these services and from manufacturers that have seen the benefits and provide a meeting place for the two communities – technology providers/developers and interested manufacturers.
Innovative Digital Technologies in Net Zero
In this event we looked at how manufacturers can gather, process, present and analyse data from the factory to enable rigorous management decisions regarding energy reduction.
This can be for direct cost reduction through lower energy bills or to reduce the carbon footprint of manufactured goods which comes under increasing scrutiny from consumers.
Innovative Digital Technologies in Supply Chain
In this event we will be looking at how manufacturers can gather, process and present data from the factory in sufficient detail to give customers visibility of their orders. This level of granularity is also extremely helpful to the factory management team to fully understand work in progress and allow management time to be spent proactively maximising customer experience.
